Comment by alchemist1e9
6 hours ago
EDIT: comment was under incorrect parent. my error. moved it to correct location.
EDIT2: Actually it’s more interesting. The commenters seem have changed their wording away from what I was criticizing.
Original observation: Try to purge envy from your heart. It’s a poison.
There was originally a lot of dark envy in this thread but interestingly it’s been revised out to be more subtle.
I don't feel the parent post is about bad envy. There is also good envy, when you feel happy for someone's blessings. But you also would like to have it for yourself.
Nah this is definitely bad type of envy you can look at the full discussion and additional comments from the user.
In a working society, nobody should be able to throw away life changing money. Being rich is poisonous to society. Most of us suffer due to people hoarding money and humanity needs to overcome the concept of money generally.
“Life changing” money is relative. We take some family friends and their kids on a vacation every two years. Sometimes the bill is split, sometimes we cover most or all of the cost. We’re not rich, we just have extra money they don’t because of different life circumstances. But as a result we can help give them and their kids experiences they never would have had. Likewise some friends who are better off than we are were able to take us on a trip we could not have afforded on our own. Again they’re not rich, just a different set of life circumstances.
Now you might argue that “vacations” aren’t “life changing”, but I would certainly argue that if you never would have had the experience or seen the place then they absolutely can be. But even if not, I refer you back to the original thesis which is that “life changing” is relative. Because the sums of money we’re talking about would have been “pay my rent for a year”, “buy a reliable (used) car”, “reduce my student loan balance by nearly a third” sort of money. And those I think could all be reasonably said to be life changing sorts of things.
Finally I would suggest that if you are “throwing away” this sort of money on actually changing someone’s life, then you are by definition not “hoarding money” and can hardly be said to be poisoning society with your relative wealth.
Hoarding money is not economically prudent in a system designed with mild inflation. Money loses value sitting still, to grow wealth there has to be some action with a positive return. The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours...
I've spent a lot of time in communities trying to grow past 'money' and decided that the usual replacement is allegiance to some other ideology that aligns everyone's incentives to a common cause or cult. I'd rather have diverse incentives with a common language of cash.
If we cant grow past money as a species we are pretty much doomed. I'd rather have allegiance or community based incentives over monetary gain, given that most people on earth can't really afford life anymore and rack up debt so rich people can get richer.
6 replies →
> The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours...
There are just purely economic problems caused by wealth inequality too because while money numbers can just keep going up infinitely, there are only so many real assets (and services like education and healthcare) that can be bought with those money numbers, so the higher the wealth of the top relative to everyone else, the easier they price everyone else out of the economy, which we are very much seeing the effects of over the last few years as things get increasingly K-shaped and the middle class vanishes.
All of this said, the last time and place I'm going to be snarky or critical of any one person's wealth is when they are voluntarily redistributing it to improve things for the common good.
Wicked people will be wicked with or without money.
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